Why are not all of the Kabuki Jūhachiban and Shin Kabuki Jūhachiban performed today?

It helps to fix the sequence. The Kabuki Jūhachiban were designated by Danjūrō VII in the Tenpō era: eighteen plays bound up with the Ichikawa line. What matters is that the selection was not a list of plays then frequently performed. It gathered works with a claim on the family's art, and some of them had by that time long been absent from the stage.

Why would a play lapse? Edo theatre was strongly an art of the single occasion. Scripts might survive, but the movement and the musical cues — the kata — existed only in the bodies of actors, and vanished when the last performer did. Edo's theatres also burned repeatedly, and documents were lost with them. So plays came to survive as a title and a scattering of records.

What follows is a history of filling in. Since Danjūrō IX, successive actors have mounted revivals, working from surviving scripts, programmes and pictorial sources, supplying the missing parts by inference and imagination. Not all have returned to the regular repertory; some, having been revived, grew scarce again. So the Jūhachiban is better thought of as a vein still being worked than as a shelf of finished masterpieces. The Shin Kabuki Jūhachiban — the group said to have been selected by Danjūrō IX — stands in much the same position.